Brimming with magical thoughts yet precise in its anthropological scope, director Marta Mateus‘ first feature, “Fogo do Vento,” asks a lot from cinema.

Having taken more than four years to complete, the film does not lack ambition or a sense of concision; it runs barely 70 minutes. Both qualities lend the film a particular intensity and focus.

As Variety sat down with Mateus at the Locarno Film Festival, where this beguiling first work is premiering in the main competition, she insisted right away that she sees her work of making films “as a kind of atelier.” The film itself is closer to a meticulously crafted art object than anything else, which only serves to reinforce Mateus’ point.

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The stillness of the camera in the film helps create this sense of craftedness in each shot. “One time, a filmmaker told me, ‘Oh, you did that film where people never move.’ What was he talking about? Then I understood perhaps he had this feeling since it is, in fact, the camera that almost never moves.”

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This compositional sense does much to suggest Mateus’ debt to a tradition of painting more than anything particularly cinematic. “I’ve studied many things, but not cinema. I didn’t want to study cinema, because I knew that’s what I wanted to do, so I thought that I would not let anyone tell me how to do it,” she says from under a tree in a garden in Locarno. Mateus studied philosophy, theatre, and music – as a bet that, in the future, tools from different disciplines would nurture her vision of the art of filmmaking.

Largely shot in broad daylight, the sun plays a primary role in Mateus’ forest-set film. It bears down on wine workers toiling in fields and sneaks between the leaves of the trees as the workers seek refuge from a wild bull up in the branches. As we spoke, Mateus recalled in detail the difficulty of working with natural light that changes constantly and didn’t wait for any man (or woman) to capture it. Again and again, Mateus and her crew went back to the same place, searching for truth in every frame.

“I give a lot of attention to images that appear in my mind. When you shoot for a long time, you store these images in the back of your brain. Maybe another image would come to me during the shooting, and I would have to rework the narrative, but we as filmmakers must accept that that’s how it works.”

The changing light is the most obvious sign of transience in “Fogo do Vento,” but Mateus’ work is more than a mere expression of incarnation and immediacy. Always leaning into a materialistic reading of what has passed, it seems to be evoking history with every shot.

“Fogo do Vento” is as concerned with notions of community, nation, and struggle as it is self-contained as an artwork, working on both intimate and trans-historical levels.

“There is a whole world inside each one of us. We all carry this connection to history and are responsible for it”, Mateus states. The photos dating back to the colonial war in Africa that Maria Catarina, the main character, offers to the viewer, or the figure of João de Encarnação, the great-grandfather of the director, haunting the film as a young soldier from the Great War, further suggest an eternal presence of the specter of history.

Yet the film moves beyond national narratives to play its part in the bigger confrontation of images. “I also wanted to think about how banal the image of war has become lately,” Mateus says. With political conflicts looming large, cinema can offer a counter-image to the propagated violence seen in mass media.

“History is also built on images. We have to understand which images we want to keep because the imagery of war creates images of war. Film has to act as disruption of this flow, to be the ally of the humanity we do not generally care to look at.”

The film is rooted in an ancestral, almost sacred territory – Alentejo in Portugal – allowing for the intrusion of symbolic imagery. A dangerous bull stalks the fields and forces the peasants and workers to clamber up into the trees, giving new meaning to the idea of a shared solidarity.

“I grew up in Portugal in the middle of nowhere, where the oral tradition is still very important. Storytelling – legends and myths – were part of our everyday life,” says the director.

This personal experience thus overlapped with the film’s ritualistic approach towards history and the possibility of breaking the chain of suffering – the hope of revolution and liberation. “The sun is very, very, very old. Much more so than the basis that we built our history on.”

Decades ago, militant cinema relied on images that would provoke shock, stir tensions and force the spectator to take a stance. Mateus, however, opts for a different approach, a different resistance: a precise way of understanding the force of a shot and a scattered pace and rhythm of almost chanted dialogue that evokes how oral cultures interpret the world, far away from the contemporary lineal, capitalistic way of making sense of things.

“I think today cinema plays a very important role, but in a very unconscious way. It has a symbolic force, and it stimulates our imagination in a way that we are not fully aware of. Cinema can be a disruptive force and can also give us a new conscience about something – an emotional, sentimental feeling. And, in doing so, it creates something new. How and why a film touches you is also important”, she says, inviting viewers to let her film speak for itself.

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